German friends are unimpressed by the way I become entangled in such profundities. You go out looking for things, they say, but that is only partially true. Bismarck in Hamburg was unavoidable, as was the monument with the marching soldiers. Such things are just standing there in streets and parks, I say, maybe I am simply quicker to spot them. So did you see Hrdlicka’s counter-memorial near the marching soldiers, they ask, the sculptures that he did not complete, because he fell out with the city council? Yes, I saw that too, a dialectical monument, intended to contradict the other one. For Hrdlicka, war is not about marching soldiers, but about victims, women and children in bombings, corpses of soldiers in trenches, about executions, torture, resistance. The city had kindly provided a sign to say that the monument is still under construction, but it is open, it refers only to itself, it is unfinished, it has not yet had its say, it hangs around the other monument like a lament, around those marching men with their closed faces who all appear to be thinking the same thought.
“And Bismarck? What about him?” I would say that any politician who is convinced that it is not he who is making history but that he, like everyone else, must wait to see how it will unfold is attempting a correction to Bismarck’s grandiose monument (which, of course, he did not erect himself). The portrait that Golo Mann paints of Bismarck—Faust and Mephisto, pious and cynical, monarchist and despiser of princes, melancholic, power politician, great orator, contemptuous of every form of ideology—is at any rate more nuanced than the image my German friends seem to have of him.
“Alright, then, but Kiefer?” Do I not realize that he is totally passé? He may well be, but why should I care? I can see perfectly well that his art is as heavy as the lead he uses to make it, but isn’t it the country itself that has for centuries pressed this weight, this didactic heaviness of heart, onto its artists? They talk about Bildungsbürgertum, the educated classes, about Kiefer in his role as praeceptor Germaniae, as a self-proclaimed prophet who has not really digested the images he borrows from Jewish mysticism but merely uses them as cosmetic set pieces, just as during an earlier, provocative period he appropriated German myth for his own purposes. That may well be, but I am never very concerned with how a work of art comes about or what the barometer of the art world says, what other people think of it and what hidden motives and political or financial manipulation they suspect; all that matters is the actual object I am standing in front of, capturing me within its apocalyptic force field, as someone behind me says, “C’est la souffrance.”
There is clearly no talking to me. I am obviously determined to note the German in all that is German, but can I at least see that Strauss is no more than a sensationalist who weaves political profundity without any clarity into his plays, who has produced only empty words and innuendo on the subject of unification? And did I not hear the booing during that insanely kitschy scene with the eagle? Yes, I heard it, and maybe I even understood it, because it is a scene that belongs in a Spielberg film, not on the stage, and I cannot imagine an English play in which a lion is invited to have its way with the leading lady, and yet I also saw some magnificent scenes that night, and thoughts about the performance keep running through my mind. And, possibly even worse, I keep seeing eagles everywhere I look: Prussian ones and Hessian ones, the eagle of Weimar, which is once again the present-day eagle, tamed ones, crowned ones, post eagles and police eagles, until someone shows me the most beautiful eagle of all, the one with the straight, horizontal wings that I remember from my childhood, the one from the flags, only now it is no longer dancing through the streets, it is hanging in stone above the entrance to the tax office near my house. It has been allowed to stay, but the swastika has been removed from the ring in its claws, and in its place there is a number 48, the number of the building. I will keep it to myself that this lends the number 48 a kabbalistic significance that comes somewhere close to redemption.
June 1991
VILLAGE WITHIN THE WALL
Before the Wall, after the Wall, that is how time is divided now, even if you wish it were not so. You do not feel it every day—sometimes it is just a twinge—but then it hits you again, often on Sundays. It is inconceivable now, but this city once was captive, and what little greenery there was always ended in a Wall that you could not miss. You wanted to get out, but wherever you went, the others were there too; you could never escape.
“Everyone knows about that.”
“Yes, but I’m going to say it anyway.”
We often used to visit Lübars, a small village with a church, a pump, a village pub, the illusion of countryside, as though it was somehow possible to get out of the city. Girls rode horses over the cobbles of the village square. You walked past the farm with the geese and chickens, where they sold herbs and pickled gherkins, and at the fork where Blankenfelder Chaussee meets Schildower Weg you chose the latter, because it was unsurfaced, just a path. A gently undulating landscape, with lonely lime trees dotted here and there. Like everyone else, we had developed techniques for avoiding oncoming walkers, for ignoring them, so that it felt as though we were almost alone. The path veered left after a while, and in the distance was the drab shadow of the Wall. Sometimes the hazy light made it look almost beautiful, an ancient monument. We usually left the path there and walked on through the grass to a small river that I only later realized was the Tegeler Fließ, and we would stand there for a while. And that was it. The water was brownish, but clear and rather deep. The strong current carried all sorts of things along with it: twigs, leaves, straw-colored reeds. Right in the middle of the river stood a post with a sign that said the border ran through that exact point, and that attempting to cross to the opposite bank, which was so close, was forbidden and dangerous. The land on the other bank looked the same as the land on our side. More reeds, and crows, and lime trees, no-man’s land as a mirror image, and the mirror was empty. Still in the distance, the tall lights, the real barrier, the concrete. Naked, no writing on it. Then we would turn around, go right, up a little hill, and where Schildower Weg headed towards the forbidden world—and was therefore a dead end—we would come to a new tarmac path that ran alongside a narrow strip of bushes. Beyond that was a steel fence; if you stood there, the men in the nearby tower turned their binoculars on you. You could almost feel your face being comically magnified, no longer entirely belonging to you, as it was drawn upwards, as if somehow it was up there in the tower too, in that square room with the large windows, where those men were sitting, bored. I could smell their boots and heard without hearing what they were saying about the women on our side riding past on horses. But maybe their boots did not smell and maybe they were not looking. Sometimes a silly little car in army colors drove along the narrow road that went from tower to tower. That is how it was. A steel wall, a fifty-meter strip of sand, a road, a tower. After that, Wall, landscape, church. Blankenfelde, maybe the men even lived there.
On Sunday, I was back in Lübars. I took bus 222 and got off at the last stop. The grave of the local landowner was still there in the green grass around the church. He has been lying in the graveyard since 1899, through two world wars, without anyone waking him up. There are very few walkers, and the path is wet and muddy. Crows, rotting leaves, a pheasant taking flight in the undergrowth. The post is still in the middle of the river, but the board has gone. The water is flowing quickly, but where is it going in such a hurry? Leaves, twigs—I stare at them, and then, just as we used to, we head uphill, but where the tarmac path ran along the wall of steel there is no longer a path. I can see the traces of a harrow in the soft earth: path has become field. The tower no longer exists and I look through the absent steel at an absent tower with absent men, an absent Wall. Where the silly little car once drove, walkers now head to Blankenfelde. After the war, the Dutch poet J. C. Bloem wrote, “En niet één van de ongeborenen zal de vrijheid ooit zo beseffen” (“and not one of the unborn will ever comprehend freedom in this way”). Standing here, I feel the impact of his words. My path has become a
field and the forbidden road is now my path. I walk across a space where men would once have had to shoot me and I feel a shiver that soon no one will feel. History erases its traces and that is how it becomes history. (Invisible traces, visible reality.)
February 1993
RHEINSBERG: AN INTERMEZZO
Rheinsberg?
My German friends nod. Of course, Rheinsberg, the word, the name, flows naturally from their lips; perhaps they even feel a little sympathy for this curious foreigner and his questions. Rheinsberg! And immediately that word is surrounded by other, more familiar sounds: Frederick the Great, Tucholsky, von Katte, Fontane . . . He hears the mild reproach in their voices, but does not know quite how to connect all those familiar names to the word he has never heard before.
Of course, he is guilty as charged. What is this peculiar, dark gap in his knowledge of their country? How is it that they have never caught him out before? And now they are coming at him from all sides: Frederick, the great King of the Prussians, and Voltaire, to whom the young, enlightened prince sent countless letters from Rheinsberg, his summer residence in the Mark Brandenburg, about which Theodor Fontane would later write such wonderful travel accounts. And Claire of course, the unconventional Claire from Tucholsky’s classic Rheinsberg: Ein Bilderbuch für Verliebte (his “picture book for lovers”), with her odd, confusing language, strolling and romancing with her Wolfgang in the woods around the castle; the young crown prince looking out over those same woods from his tower room as he writes his Anti-Machiavel (“What! You’ve never read it? But I hope you’ve read the letters to Voltaire. You have, haven’t you?”). And then there is the other prince, Frederick’s brother Heinrich, who would so much rather have been called Henri. He lived in Rheinsberg for fifty years, but my German friends seem ready to forgive the curious foreigner for not knowing anything about this, and he senses that there is a degree of irony in their laughter.
An air of mystery surrounds this forgotten Prussian noble—suggestions, suspicions, contradictions, as though vague rumors are still drifting out of history, rumors of loneliness, fraternal hatred, courage, of a small, ugly man who loved big, beautiful men, of French poems, conversations, speeches that floated away into the archetypically German landscapes of Brandenburg, of the childless marriages of this prince and his brother, and of wives who dissolved into thin air, with only their silent ghosts remaining in insignificant paintings.
Now they are handing him books, maps, leaflets. Whatever he might have imagined, it was not this. “Rhein” perhaps suggested the idea of the river that lies much closer to his own home, of knights’ castles high on pine-covered hills, of the sweet and baneful song of the Lorelei. What he sees in the photographs looks like two neighboring mansions with red-tiled roofs. They are connected by a colonnade and lie at right angles to the water. At the point where they almost touch the water, they each have a squat, round tower with a conical cherry-colored roof. The buildings themselves are the color of vanilla ice cream, which reflects so beautifully in the dark, pond-like water. In other photographs taken from the water he can see that the buildings are not actually as close to the lake as he thought; there is plenty of room to insert charming, contemplative figures, a garland of flowers, an elegant hand, folds of plaster that part to reveal an attractive, emblematic knee, a cool round shoulder. These statues have French passports; perhaps they are feeling homesick for summer in France, far away from these Brandenburg forests where the darkness descends so dangerously early in winter. But it is summer in the photographs: beeches, limes, oaks in full regalia, a victorious army.
On the day he finally goes to visit, that same army has changed unrecognisably, its festive finery lying in faded shreds on the wet ground. The silence of lengthy anticipation reigns, as if a fatal battle might begin at any moment. The arboreal regiments stand there naked and unprotected, masters of their own memory, silent men who give nothing away.
But he is not there yet. He and his friend the philosopher are heading out of the big city on the Autobahn to Hamburg. Both of them can still remember the border crossing points from before 1989 and are amazed at how thoroughly history can wipe out its traces when it wants to. There is nothing to see, just great grey cloud formations that appear to be moving out in every direction, but now and then there is a sudden break in the darkness, and the landscape lights up with a strange glow of copper or zinc.
Forests, fields, distant church towers, the foreign traveler remembers how mysterious he found it all, the villages you were not allowed to visit with your transit visa, forbidden territory where people led hidden lives. He reads the once inaccessible names on the map in his lap and it seems as though they all have an extra, coded significance: Krähenberge, Karwe, Ludwigsaue, Papstthum, Roofensee, and he notices his eye straying eastwards, taking in the one hundred kilometers to Poland, to the east, in a single movement, which is more distant, more exotic for him, as he comes from the coast. They stop in Lindow, have something to eat at the Hotel Klosterblick, gaze out over the water, which looks cold and wintery, and decide that they would like to stay there or come back just to read and let the wind blow the world away from their minds. An old monastery wall, a few graves. What was it that his friend had said as they drove over the now invisible border? “The German that the border guards used to speak . . . sometimes it was almost as baffling as if a Papuan in New Guinea had suddenly started speaking German to you.” Here, on these graves, the language is still as it was; it has not been deformed: “Gleich dem Wanderer am schwülen Tage drückte dich Erblassten oft die Last des Lebens am Stabe. Noch deine letzten Stunden waren dir ein bitterer Kelch, aber du gingst dem Frieden Gottes entgegen.”1 Names, years, but the dead have taken their secrets with them and are giving nothing away.
There is just one, abandoned car in the car park; this is not a day for visitors. Wood, park, castle, but he feels that he is approaching the house in the wrong way, as though it does not yet wish to be seen, or only from a distance. Woods and parkland: how do they compare? Poodle and sheepdog? Or is it more like sheepdog and wolf? Parks are nature tamed, instinct trained: you may grow so far and no further, grass like a military buzz cut, shrubs standing in a line, gardeners as hairdressers and beauty specialists; as he crosses Fontane-Allee, he sees a team of young gardeners gathering fallen leaves as though they were a treasured harvest. The eighteenth century did not tolerate rampant growth or acknowledge ungovernable forces; it demanded submission: meticulous squares of pruned roses, vegetal geometry, bowers and pavilions with doors that opened outwards, and through which, in accordance with the rigid laws of perspective, a prince might observe a young count approaching in the distance, rehearsing his opening gambit in French. Connections, relationships, both literal and figurative, the enlightenment of the Encyclopédie as opposed to the darkness of possible chaos, always lying in wait—this is what the two friends discuss as they walk along the reed-fringed bank, before moving on to the correlation between reality and art, because as they walk from the regimented park into the dark mass of the Boberow-Wald, the bare trees suddenly become Caspar David Friedrich’s threateningly naked oaks, clawing at the iron sky with their arthritic, grasping fingers. All is still, one of those charged silences that summon snow or heavy rain, with the busy chugging of a small tractor as a counterpoint. Old-fashioned words come to mind, reed fringes, lily pads, all accompanied by the dull sound of an axe; this place does not want to join the present day.
A sign points to Poetensteig, the poets’ path, and slowly they climb a gentle slope to the obelisk perched up there like an admonishing finger turned to stone. This symbol has something to say. And if monuments remain standing for long enough, they always get their way. One brother was king, the other three were not. This monument, even over two hundred years later, is a stone letter from brother to brother, written from the third to the first because of the injustices done to the second. The fact that the first and the second were already dead by then is irrelevant; this is about justice, about a score
that must be settled.
It was only after the death of the king who was his brother that Prince Heinrich, who inherited Rheinsberg from him and lived there for fifty years, was able to write him this letter in stone, a coded revenge intended for future generations, who, as is their wont, generally walk past with unseeing eyes. Is this because the winds of time have blown away part of the code or because ignorance or indifference has obscured the message? Who can say? What is the process by which such things occur? The hierarchical life at the court of the Soldier King and his four sons, straitjacketed by Prussian ritual, may seem as alien as a scene from Noh theater, but dramatic atavisms can help us to travel back in time. In one corner, we have the iron father who equates himself with the state that he is still working to expand, who hated the extravagance and ostentation of his own father and unrelentingly imposed his own ideals of duty, frugality and discipline on a new caste of military men and officials, proclaiming, “I am ruining the authority of the Junkers: I shall achieve my aim and establish my sovereignty as a rock of bronze.” In the other corner, there is the king’s son, the successor who in his turn will one day have to embody the state, but who attempts to escape father, fate and state by fleeing to Poland with a friend.
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